Reclaiming A Bit Of Its Past Culture, Tribe Celebrates Return

Of Totem Pole

August 20, 1989|By Rogers Worthington, Chicago Tribune.

MACY, NEB. — If Yellow Smoke could look in from the next world on Sunday, he would see the sacred totem pole of the Omaha, back from a century in the white man`s museum, at the center of an especially joyous pow wow.

``It was a central part of our lives,`` said Doran Morris, the Omaha`s tribal chairman. ``In the 1800s, the sacred pole kept us together. After it was gone, people always felt something was missing from our ceremonies, and that something was missing from our lives.``

Morris is the great-great grandson of Yellow Smoke, who was keeper of the pole when the tribe still hunted buffalo.

After the buffalo were gone and the dispirited Omaha were pushed onto a reservation on a bluff near the Missouri River, the sacred pole ended up at Harvard`s Peabody Museum.

The pole`s return, following a year of negotiations with the Peabody, is part of a growing trend by public collections to return sacred and ceremonial items and human remains to their Indian tribal owners in Canada and the United States.

``It`s not just exclusive to North America,`` said Paul Carpentier, assistant director of collections at the National Museum of Canada. In 1985, a Kwakuit`l totem pole that stood for half a century in Chicago`s Lincoln Park was returned at the request of the Canadian tribe.

Two years ago, the Smithsonian Institution returned a collection of war gods to the Zuni Indians in New Mexico. Recently several museums returned wampum belts to the Iroquois tribe in New York. And several museums in the Southwest and Canada returned medicine bundles and prayer boards to the Navajo, Hopi, Mohawk and other tribes.

The return of human remains is also an issue, and a more volatile one. Indignant native peoples from Australia to the United States` Northwest Coast have demanded that bones and sacred funerary items collected by scientists and stored in museums be returned for proper burial.

Many curators, anthropologists and archeologists are strongly opposed. They view the skeletons and the objects buried with them as vital to learning about past inhabitants and conditions of the continent. In many cases, remains still are not identified as to tribal origin, they say.

But a mounting body of legislation is likely to force a change. A landmark law passed in Nebraska this spring, lobbied for by the Native American Rights Fund, requires that the Nebraska State Historical Society return a collection of Pawnee Indian bones to the tribe. Some 20 states, including Illinois, have passed laws that prohibit future taking of Indian remains and artifacts from unmarked graves.

At the federal level, nine bills before Congress would require the identification and return of skeletal remains and sacred items to tribes, including the 18,500 remains at the Smithsonian.

``There`s still a lot of opposition to it, but I think they`re beginning to see the handwriting on the wall,`` anthropologist Thomas King said of returning remains. King is former director of the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

Some museums, such as those at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, and the North Dakota Historical Society have decided to voluntarily return remains and objects.

But Robert Peregoy, a lawyer with the Native American Defense Fund, anticipates greater resistance from museums on returning items that are not sacred such as the ceremonial and functional objects that are the core of many native American collections.

``I think we need to be prepared for a real fight,`` said Peregoy, a member of the Flatheads, a northern Plains tribe.

The rising demand by American Indian tribes for the return of sacred items has coincided with a growing renaissance in the last decade in the practice of tribal culture and religion. An increasing number of tribes also have built their own museums.

``The idea is to show things from an Indian perspective,`` said Elwood Green, curator of the Center for Living Arts, an Iroquois museum in Niagara Falls, N.Y.

``Too often, (white) museums tend to highlight the bizarre. It would be like us having a pilgrim display that shows a witch getting dunked in water or burned at the stake.``

In some rare cases, including the sacred totem pole of the Omaha, Indian items were given to non-Indian museums to hold in trust.

It is a small pole, about 5 inches in diameter, smeared with pigments, wrapped with skins and topped by a scalp, presumably of an Indian enemy.

Yellow Smoke had given the pole to Alice Fletcher, a Peabody anthropologist who visited the tribe in 1888. At first, he had planned to have the pole buried with him for he feared that the younger generation no longer valued it.

``Some in the tribe thought the pole had lost its power,`` Morris said.

``My grandfather was concerned about that.``

``Alice Fletcher never thought the Omaha would be around 100 years later,`` said Ian Brown, assistant director of the Peabody. ``It was thought Indians would assimilate into white society and disappear as tribal units.``

But the Omaha did not disappear. In fact, says Morris, with 2,200 on the reservation, there are more Omaha today than there were in 1888.

Both Morris and tribal historian Dennis Hastings believe the tribe is in need of the unity and the pole`s return will give the tribe a new sense of purpose.

``We are trying to rebuild our culture so our people can feel a psychological whole,`` said Hastings, who studied anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.

According to Omaha myth, the pole was made from a limb of a tree found glowing in the night by a young warrior returning from a hunt, Morris said. The pole was treated as a person, because tribal members believed God spoke through it.

``If white men can believe God spoke through a burning bush,`` Hastings said, ``then we can believe He spoke through a pole.``